Rob Napier‘s short anecdote intrigued me, and I was curious if anything has changed in the fourteen months since. After all, that’s supposed to be eons in “AI” terms, right? Spoiler: not much has changed. Kagi does a bit better, but Bing is still the best, Google still sucks, and ChatGPT (when considering Bing Copilot… Read more
Reading SwiftData vs Realm: Performance Comparison reminded me of an anecdote from my days working on Shark, at Apple. I don’t really remember the timing – sometime between 2006 and 2010 – but presumably around 2006 as I recall it was when Core Data was still relatively new. For whatever reason, there was a huge… Read more
I don’t know why, but it’s apparently impossible to directly import a Lightroom catalog from one computer into the catalog of another. It always fails at the end of the import with the same infuriatingly useless error message. However, I seem to have found a fairly reliable workaround: In my experience you must perform the… Read more
Five years ago installing Swift on a Raspberry Pi – or really any non-Apple platform – was fairly involved. Compared to getting a Raspberry Pi working to begin with it was easy, but still a far cry from apt install swift. Sadly it’s still not quite that easy (and some Python package is squatting on… Read more
Swift makes it relatively easy to format numbers as byte counts, with appropriate suffixes to indicate units and generally sensible auto-selection of scale factors. e.g.: 1 kB (in English – results may vary depending on locale) This is just a small subset of Swift’s FormatStyle-based formatting capabilities, with which I have a bit of a… Read more
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Swift’s FormatStyle-based formatting capabilities. 42% (in English – results may vary depending on locale) On the pro side: But the cons are rough: All in all, there’s a reason fuckingformatstyle.com exists (and don’t forget to tip!).
APFS (like many modern file systems but unlike its predecessor HFS+) supports copy-on-write. This means you can logically copy a file – it looks and behaves like a distinct file – but it doesn’t immediately copy the file’s contents on disk – it merely shares them with the original. Only if and as you modify… Read more